Your website address please

An elegant website or a blog is a much better tool to introduce you or your business to me than your business card or 5 minute talk in the hotel lobby. Even if you have nothing to put on your website, start with a single page, putting your resume and contact information there.

There was a time when building a website was difficult. You were supposed to learn about quite a few technical things like html, ftp, web hosting etc. as well as buy and install software to build the website and upload it to the internet. The “easiest” tool was Microsoft Frontpage which allowed non-technical people build a website with broken links and many under-construction pages. These under-contruction pages never got updated because of the hassle involved.

Not any more. There are now a lot of wonderful tools and websites which will get you started building a new website or blog absolutely free in minimal time. A very short list includes blogger.com, google sites and, my personal favorite, wordpress.com.

WordPress.com gives you a website in matter of seconds. You can write your blog or create a website to sell something using the powerful control panel without learning a whole stack of internet technologies.

WordPress.com (and other such tools) gives you a web-based control panel to build your website. There is nothing to install on your computer. This makes it easy to incrementally develop your website from your home or office or with the help of your online friends.